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EVE: Valkyrie was one of the first games Oculus used to show off one of its Rift prototypes, and since 2014, the game has been associated exclusively with virtual reality. That's changing. The game's "Warzone" update will strip the VR headset requirement, allowing anyone with a PlayStation 4 or powerful enough PC to play the game. If you're keeping track at home, that means truecross-platform multiplayer is here; you'll be able to battle folks on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PC, PS4 and PSVR.

The total solar eclipse is just a week away in the US, and unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that this is an experience you simply cannot miss. But if you don't live in the eclipse path and can't travel for it (or waited until too late to make your plans), there a few options for livestreaming the event. Today, CNN revealed its plans for the eclipse: a 360-degree live stream from multiple locations along the eclipse's path.

Rez has always been a game focused on immersing yourself in music and rhythm. Every version of the shooter, from its original launch on the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 to last year'sRez Infinite on the PS4 and PS VR, has pushed that idea of immersion forward in some way. Now it's finally available on PCs ($25 on Steam and the Oculus Store) and in VR on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. And, not surprisingly, I found it to be a transcendental digital experience. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's the purest expression of Rez so far.

Oculus' launcher software is, unsurprisingly, focused on running VR apps from the Oculus Store. But that's probably not how you get all your apps -- you may have Rift-ready games in Steam, for instance. That won't be a problem from now on. Oculus has updated its portal to offer fast access to any Rift-compatible app on your PC, whether it comes from Steam or anywhere else. You won't have to think about removing your Rift headset just to see the full extent of your app library.

Alien: Isolationis a terrifying game, even before you add VR to the mix. But, for those of you dying to experience the survival horror in all its immersive (underwear-spoiling) glory, you can now play it on the current-gen Oculus Rift. An alpha version of the "MotherVR" mod that works with the original game is available to download right now. Installation is straightforward too: simply copy a DLL from the archive into the game folder and you're good to go. Just be sure you have the nerve to take it on first.

Sansar, the VR platform by Second Life creator Linden Lab, is now available for everyone to explore. The public "creator beta" follows a private "creator preview," which allowed developers and aspiring level designers to try Sansar's building tools. That period was crucial given, like Second Life, Linden Lab is banking on the community to populate Sansar with interesting experiences. Today, there are "hundreds" of places to explore, including museums, theaters and tropical temples. Some are virtual postcards, while others have games and stories inside them. Everything is free to try too, whether you're playing on a PC, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.

We'll be the first to admit that a virtual-reality session isn't terribly conducive to bonding with new friends in the dorm. But, hey, a few of us here at Engadget are introverts, so you don't need to explain to us the value of strapping on a headset and momentarily blocking out the stress of classes and meeting new people. Included in our back-to-school guide are many of the usual suspects, like the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and Daydream View. We also recommend the optional Rift and Gear VR controllers, as well as games like Rock Band VR and Farpoint. Enjoy your escape from the real world, but remember to take a social break from time to time.

It's 1982. A young boy named Dennis has just received the birthday present of his dreams. It's you -- a Japanese robot that can repeat words, although for the most part you watch silently. That's the premise of Felix & Paul Studios' 40-minute-long VR comedic feature for Funny Or Die called Miyubi, which launches in the Oculus store today. Through events happening to a family over the course of a year, it tells a bleak story of the futility of trying to outrace obsolescence. The harrowing message hits especially hard because of how effectively the show's creators use the medium, forcing you to witness times changing around you.

If it wasn't already clear that Disney is big on wearable gaming, it is now. It just introducedPowers United VR, and it's pretty much what you'd expect if you dreamed up a superhero virtual reality game. You step into the suit of one of multiple legendary Marvel figures (including Captain Marvel, the Hulk, Rocket Raccoon and Ronan the Accuser) and join your friends as you battle villains using your character's unique powers. And in this case, that makes a big difference -- Hulk towers over his enemies and can throw missiles back at his opponents, for instance, while Rocket makes up for his small size with firepower.

If you can't spare $399 for the Oculus Rift and Touch bundle while it's still on sale, don't worry. The Facebook-owned company is permanently dropping the all-in-one package's price to $499 once the sale ends in around six weeks. A bundle would've cost you almost $800 when the VR headset first became available until it got a $200 price cut (repriced to $598) in March. Another $99 off is a pretty sweet deal if you really can't buy the package anytime soon, considering a standalone Rift and a pair of Touch controllers will already set you back $400 and $99, respectively.

A few months ago, Oculus dropped the price of a Rift and Touch bundle to just $598, which is a good $200 drop from what it was before. If even that was too rich for your blood however, well, get ready for some good news. For a limited time only, you can get both the Oculus Rift headset and the Touch controller for just $399/£399. That puts it on par price-wise with the PSVR, which has been the cheapest pro-level VR headset to date. In short, it's a really great deal.

It's all part of Oculus' "Summer of Rift" event, where it plans to announce new titles and offer discount deals on games (there was a 60 percent off sale during the July 4th weekend). And, according to Oculus, get ready for even more news from now until Oculus Connect 4, its annual developer conference, later this October.

As for this Rift and Touch deal, however, you had better get on it if you want to take advantage of it. That's because the discount price is only valid for the next six weeks. So if you have your heart set on trying out titles like Wilson's Heart or Lone Echo, this $200 price drop on Oculus hardware is a great excuse to finally do so.

Google has released a new app that will make it much easier to create that VR experience you've whipped up in your head -- and it won't cost you a single cent. The big G's "Blocks," now out for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, will give you a way to draw 3D objects directly in virtual reality. It's like Oculus Story Studio's Quill and Google's own Tilt Brush in that respect, except it leads to blocky, Lego-esque final products instead of painterly illustrations.

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A Finnish company called Varjo that has been working in secret until now has unveiled a new type of VR and AR headset code-named "20/20." It supposedly has a display with "human eye-resolution" quality of over 70 megapixels versus around 1.2 megapixels per eye for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Public libraries aren't just for books anymore. These days, you can grab an e-book, movie or video game (not to mention learn how to code) at your local branch with nothing more than a free library card. Libraries are also the last bastion of internet access for those who can't afford it on their own, making the library an essential democratic tool. Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company, is taking it upon themselves to enhance public libraries with its own educational initiative that will place 100 VR head-mounted displays in 90 California libraries.

Apple shined a dull spotlight on virtual reality during its WWDC keynote yesterday, introducing VR support for macOS and a beefed-up, VR-capable version of the new iMac. This marks Apple's first real dive into VR, and, honestly, it's too little, too late. The potential of modern VR has been looming over the technology industry for nearly five years now, exciting consumers and prompting plenty of companies to develop their own support systems and hardware for this strange new virtual world.

But until yesterday, it was impossible to natively develop or even run VR experiences on an Apple machine. The first instance of built-in VR support for macOS developers comes about a year after Google, Facebook, Samsung, HTC and Sony actually put their VR headsets on stores shelves, and Apple hasn't hinted that it's working on any proprietary hardware.

Apple's nod to VR, one year late, feels like a lackluster reaction to an evolving industry rather than a prescient foray into a new and thrilling technological landscape. It feels a lot like Apple doesn't believe in VR.

The Oculus Rift has technically supported room-scale VR since the system's Touch motion controllers first went on sale last December. But purchasing an additional sensor didn't guarantee foolproof 3D tracking for greater immersion right off the bat. Oculus labelled the feature "experimental," alerting early adopters to the likelihood of bugs and other gremlins you might expect from in-development functionality. Six months and several updates later, however, Oculus has decided room-scale support is robust enough in its latest software release that it can ditch the beta tag and be called a bona fide Rift feature.

Both Fox and director Ridley Scott have made bit commitments to virtual reality, and you're about to see just how those commitments are evolving... in an unsettling way. Fox has revealed that Alien: Covenant's VR experience, In Utero, will be available for Oculus Rift wearers on April 26th. As the name implies, the production shows the terror from the baby alien's (that is, neomorph's) perspective as it's born. The teaser clip doesn't show much, but it's already disconcerting -- you can hear muffled screams as the humans realize something is about to go very, very wrong.

Quill, like Google's Tilt Brush, is an artistic tool that lets you paint in virtual reality. Designed for the Oculus Rift, it's a liberating way to draw and view art in 3D space. The next step? Animation. Goro Fujita, art director at Oculus Story Studio, has created a small but beautifully detailed street which you can explore with the Rift. It's all hand-drawn, and positional audio means you can hear birds chirping in the trees, as well as cars rushing by and a nutty engineer building robots in his store. He's uploaded a guided tour to YouTube, which I highly recommend checking out.

Making movies in virtual reality is easy. Making good animated movies in virtual reality is hard. There's no "mise en scène" to play with, and even the basic 180-degree rule is washed away with a head turn. The limitations of a cinema screen make storytelling easier, linear, comfortable. Penrose Studios doesn't care much for comfort, it seems. The same studio that gave us the haunting Allumette and infantile captivation of The Rose and I is back at the Tribeca Film Festival this year with its third VR story -- Arden's Wake -- and it promises to be bigger, more detailed and more technically improbable than anything we've seen from the studio so far.

When Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2 billion in early 2014, it wasn't entirely clear what Mark Zuckerberg planned to do with all of the virtual reality hardware suddenly at his fingertips. Hell, it wasn't even clear that VR was going to be a legitimate industry: Sony hadn't revealed the PlayStation VR yet, Google Cardboard didn't exist, and Valve was a year away from announcing the HTC Vive headset. VR was truly in its infancy when the world's largest social networking site strode in, promising to deliver video games and "many other experiences" on the Oculus Rift.

The Google Earth revamp isn't just focused on the web and mobile crowds -- there are a few perks for virtual reality fans as well. Google has updated Earth's free VR experience to support the Oculus Rift headset and its Oculus Touch controllers. You no longer need HTC's Vive to fly over landscapes, including 27 new ones like Germany's Neuschwanstein Castle or South Africa's Table Mountain. It'll no doubt seem familiar if you've tried it before, but there is big interface update to go along with the widened hardware support.

Facebook teased how it would create social experiences in virtual reality, and now it's ready to take things one step further. It just launched a Facebook Spaces beta that lets Oculus Rift owners hang out together (up to four at once) in VR. The experience will be familiar if you saw Facebook's preview at Oculus Connect, but it's clearly more refined with its actual launch. You can create an avatar that's as realistic or fanciful as you want, draw 3D objects and show off your personal videos and use 360-degree video backgrounds to liven up your chats. There's even a selfie stick to take virtual self-portraits. And if a friend can't use VR, you can bring them into the conversation using Facebook Messenger video calls.

If you want to see the potential of virtual reality, check out SoundStage: a virtual reality music sandbox app for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Google just snapped up developer Logan Olson for its VR team, further proving the company's continued interest in becoming a true player in the space.